It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Birth of the Post Hip Hop Generation Book

This book is so much bigger than hip-hop. The author, who was a professor at 23 and just 26 at the time of its release, shows a better understanding of the material he samples and mixes into his work than most professors twice his age. Little wonder has been described as "a rare, remarkable talent that brings to mind the great artists of the Harlem Renaissance". The book is repetitive in parts, but the reader may get the feeling that the author is well aware of that, using repetition like a catchy hook to hammer his points home. Here are some quotes I liked:

When you make an observation, you have an obligation.

Post-hip-hop is an assertion of agency that encapsulates this generation's broad range of abilities, ideals, and ideas, as well as incorporates recent social advances and movements... that hip hop has either failed or refused to prioritize. How can one, for instance, dialogue progressively about gender issues within a space dominated by sexism and phallocentrism? Or take seriously notions of cooperative or participatory economics within a space that espouses guerilla capitalism? Or talk seriously about the end of war'over there and right here!'within a space that promotes violence?

When we consider hip hop's origins and purpose, we understand it is a revolutionary cultural force that was intended to challenge the status quo and the greater American culture. So, its relegation to reflecting American culture becomes extremely problematic if one considers the radical tradition of African-American social movements'which have never been about mirroring dominant American culture.

Saul Williams, a poet whose musical combination of hip hop, rock, techno, and a cappella Black oration might be called post-hip-hop, asks us, "So what is hip hop? Well, with Public Enemy and KRS-One, hip hop became the language of youth rebellion. But now, commercial hip hop is not youth rebellion, not when the heroes of hip hop like Puffy are taking pictures with Donald Trump and the heroes of capitalism'you know that's not rebellion. That's not 'the street''that's Wall Street."

Today, young people have been tricked into seeing their acts of consumerism as acts of rebellion.

[S]ociety's stereotypes function not as errors, but rather forms of social control. In my brother's case, this prison of image led him to multiple stints in prison proper.

[T]he images produced by and for whites to justify Blacks' oppression, images of savages, of laziness, of pimpism and gangsterism, have been embraced by Blacks. It means that the images that taught white people to hate Blacks, to oppress them, have ultimately resulted in Blacks hating Blacks.

The reel becomes the real.

As writer William Jelani Cobb, in To the Break of Dawn, writes, "'Real' is to the rap industry as 'All-Natural' is to the fast food supplier, as 'New and Improved' is to the ad agency. As 'I Solemnly Swear' is to the politician."

"I'm trapped between me as a person and me as J.O. the rapper," Baltimore emcee John Jones, who has just come home from serving jail time, tells me. "When I was inside [prison], I was rappin' a lot more positive. But now that I'm out, my rhymes is more on some negative stuff because that's what people want to hear. It's a different kind of prison," he explains.

So why do we continue to stay in these boxes? Perhaps it's because of the American golden rule: those with the gold make the rules. So, essentially, white teenage boys, the primary consumers of rap music, spend billions of dollars on images and music produced by white corporations that reinforce these stereotypes.

This process of white consumerism, which is age-old, has taught Blacks that there are hefty profits to be made by living down to white expectations.

Often in predominantly white educational settings, black males put on their ghetto minstrel show as a way of protecting themselves from a white racialized rage. They want to appear harmless, not a threat, and to do so they have to entertain unenlightened folks by letting them know "I don't think I'm equal to you. I know my place. Even though I am educated I know you think I am still an animal at heart."

"I was furious," said William Jones, ODB's father. "You know, that story about him being raised in the Fort Greene [Brooklyn] projects on welfare until he was a child of thirteen was a total lie," he added. When Jones talked to his wife about their son's bogus claims of ghettoship, her response was simple: "He did it for publicity."

Poet Saul Williams reminds us that "Right now, we are unable to imagine world peace. Why? Because our imaginations have been stolen from us. We can imagine World War III because we've seen it in every movie, every TV show, etc. We cannot imagine world peace because we've never seen it before."

[W]hen President Abraham Lincoln was killed, Andrew Johnson, his replacement, revoked Sherman's orders. The very few Blacks who had already received land had it quickly taken away. Abolishing slavery with no restitution is like opening the door to a prison cell, while leaving all other exits bolted, chained, and locked, and telling an inmate that "they are free." The cell door, although perhaps the most confining, is but a multitude of forces that keeps the prisoner imprisoned.

For every ten homes that they destroyed, they only built one new unit in the projects'institutional overcrowding.

When companies don't go overseas, they use prison labor instead of creating real jobs, which is, in essence, slave labor. I mean, the rates they pay prisoners rivals what they might pay a child in an impoverished country... American Airlines, Boeing, Compaq, Dell, Eddie Bauer, Chevron, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, IBM, JCPenney, TWA, McDonald's, Microsoft, Motorola, Nordstrom, Pierre Cardin, Revlon, Sony, Texas Instruments, Victoria's Secret, and Toys "R" Us, to name a few.

I mean, in America, the richest nation in the world, on any given night, 562,000 American children go to bed hungry.

Didn't Frederick Douglass say that "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

[M]ost people who live in me [the ghetto] are not addicted to drugs or alcohol, don't engage in criminal activity, and are not on welfare... I mean, Bush is as responsible for his wealth as most of my residents are for their poverty.

What we are experiencing is the manifestation of what President Richard Nixon told his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, "You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."

For the students who thought the [Black] Panthers' goals were utopian, we summoned the words of Emma Goldman who told us that "every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian."

Consider the disparity in federal sentencing laws between crack cocaine (primarily used by Blacks) and powder cocaine (primarily used by whites):
5 GRAMS OF CRACK = 5 YEARS IN PRISON
500 GRAMS OF POWDER = 5 YEARS IN PRISON

[T]he mainstream has hijacked ideas like Malcolm X's "by any means necessary" and applied it to guerilla capitalism, hence: Get Rich or Die Tryin'.

When the weeds of doubt creep into our minds and tell us that we are too small, as individuals, to make a difference, let us remember what the Ghanaian proverb says: Try sleeping in a small room with a mosquito.

James Brown records "Say It Loud'I'm Black and I'm Proud!" and "Funky Drummer;" the latter would become one of the most sampled tracks in hip-hop history. Brown would also record "Get on the Good Foot," a song promoting very high-energy, acrobatic dancing that Zulu Nation founder Afrika Bambaataa asserts led to break dancing.

Old white man after old white man, blazer after blazer, gray head after gray head, and striped tie after stripped tie, I was shocked to discover that hip hop's decision makers weren't hip hop at all. I quickly came to the realization that hip hop, this urban Black creation, was something that urban Blacks (or even just Blacks) didn't control at all.

Are we to believe that the removal of one of the only songs, and certainly the first song by a mainstream artist, to challenge the corporate sharecropping in hip hop [Mos Def's "The Rape Over"] was purely coincidental?

Despite the perception that Black entrepreneurs like P. Diddy, Russell Simmons, Jay-Z, Cash Money are moguls, they are, in actuality, the children of their respective parent companies.

The logical, necessary, and vital next step for the post-hip-hop generation is simple: ownership over its cultural creations.

The courts have become a universal device for re-enslaving blacks.
' W. E. B. DUBOIS

Nixon'who once told Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, "Henry, leave the niggers to Bill and we'll take care of the rest of the world," and complained to Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman that Great Society programs were a waste "because blacks were genetically inferior to whites"'would take office in January 1969...

As the Los Angeles Times concluded, "Although it is clear that whites sell most of the nation's cocaine and account for 80% of its consumers, it is Blacks and other minorities who continue to fill up America's courtrooms and jails."

We used to run around tryna' get money and power
Look at us now, gettin' fuckin' twelve cents a hour.
' OSCHINO, "JAIL LETTERS," BEST OF OSCHINO

"Prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits, unemployment insurance, or workers' compensation or pay," explains Linda Evans, a prisoner in California. Since the Supreme Court's 1993 ruling that inmates did not have the right to minimum wage, corporations such as American Airlines, McDonald's, Microsoft, Victoria's Secret, and Toys "R" Us have exploited and continue to exploit prisoners to meet their bottom line. Prison labor allows corporations to boast "Made in the U.S.A." while paying paltry wages that are even lower than the slave wages doled out in Southeast Asia, the Pacific Rim, and Latin America.

Put another way, the prison industry hires more people than any Fortune 500 company, with the exception of General Motors.

It's "impossible to run an election campaign without advocating more jails, harsher punishment, more executions, all the things that have never worked to reduce crime but have always worked to get votes," concludes George Gerbner, former dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication and one of the nation's foremost experts on the media.

Frederick Douglass warned: "Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong, which will be imposed upon them..."

In France, the Black and Arab youth scream "Police partout, justice nulle part!" meaning "Police everywhere, justice nowhere."

Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
' ELIE WIESEL

Take a look around and be for or against
but you can't do shit if you ridin' the fence.
' THE COUP, "RIDE THE FENCE," PARTY MUSIC

Education should liberate, not enslave. And eventually, in the long run, liberate the whole world.
- AFRAR AFRIYA, STUDENT ' LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

It's important to understand that challenging the mainstream school system is not antieducational, but actually, the contrary.

Consider that self-education implies self-motivation as opposed to grade-motivation and careerism...

I shared with them an edict that Paul Robeson once made: "The role of the artist is not simply to show the world as it is, but as it ought to be."

The African-American tradition of artivism reaches back to the djeli tradition of West Africa. Known in French as "griots," djelis were traveling poets and artists who not only included, but focused on the politics of the day and the condition of the people as a primary function in their work.

How will history, and our children's children, look upon the arts of this dark era? An era where we are under attack by those who degrade life. This war'between those individuals and institutions who seek to destroy humanity and those individuals and institutions who resist that destruction'places all of us in a crucial position in which we must choose between obliteration and restoration, life and death.

If our art does not challenge and confront, fight and tussle, wrestle, grapple and stand up against oppression, then our art is actually aiding that oppression.

If you ain't sayin nothin'
Then you the system's accomplice.
' THE ROOTS, "DON'T FEEL RIGHT," GAME THEORY

Any strategy that sees race, Black or white, as more important than ideology is a failing one... We must come to grips with the fact that symbols of progress are not substitutes for progress.

Eisenhower's logic was simple: material possessions, be they [swimming] pools or twenty-two-inch rims, nullify and trap the middle class, thus preoccupying and preventing them from challenging the status quo.

When one combines a vulgarly individualistic society with lack of historical understanding (that is: how history affects the present), the result is a flimsy attack on poor people that overemphasizes "personal responsibility." ... This is not to say that personal responsibility isn't important, but we must recognize that without proper social justice, personal responsibility is impossible to exercise.

The word "hip" comes out of the Wolof language, spoken by the Wolof people in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania. In Wolof, there's a verb, "hipi," which means "to open one's eyes and see." So, hipi is a term of enlightenment. My first name means "to see or to be enlightened," ya dig... Honky. It comes from the Wolof word "honq," which means "pink man."

[A]s Malcolm X said: "If a cat has kittens in an oven, that doesn't make them biscuits."

My music is ghetto music'period... Yet, the part of me that the honqs dega [honkys dig] is the shit that, just like back in the day, never calls their oppression out.

Man, discussin' corporate radio'Hot this, Jammin' that, Q this, Blazin' that'is like debating the pros and cons of rape.

Look at the freedom songs during the Civil Rights Movement. Those songs were the soul of that movement; the fire and fiber they needed to keep on keepin' on. Those songs were designed for one purpose: to invigorate and call to action. To prepare people for struggle, to elevate their consciousness. You've got these big powerful voices singing, "Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom," I mean, that's revolutionary. Or, even "We Shall Overcome"'that's a declaration of victory. Those songs inspired people to challenge oppression, ignited their feet, and united them for a common cause. The music was the fuel. The music was the weapon. Even Dr. King himself admitted that "through this music, the Negro is able to dip down into wells of a deeply pessimistic situation and danger-fraught circumstances and to bring forth a marvelous, sparkling, fluid optimism. He knows it is still dark in his world, but somehow, he finds a ray of light."